When I was a younger man, I had a girlfriend who used to like to go on travel excursions with me. Once, I went back to her apartment and I noticed she had the most interesting silverware, none of it matched, and most of it almost looked like it came from Denny's, it was nothing I've ever seen in the stores, or that you could buy at a regular store. It turns out when I asked her about it, she admitted that she had stolen her silverware from various restaurants when her old boyfriends used to take her out to eat.

Wow, at that point I decided she definitely wasn't "keeper" material, and so I decided we should break up. But over the next few days, I made sure that she hadn't stolen anything from me. Turned out she had. She was a kleptomaniac, yes, she was a "hottie" but she was a "hottie Klepto" and she'd be much better off with some other athletic gentleman other than myself. Still, I will give her that, she was a also a rebel with a cause, the cause of course being herself, as she had outfitted her entire kitchen with let's call it; borrowed stuff.

Now then, luckily, I haven't talked to her in years, but it always makes me wonder about small business people who own restaurants. You see, if every customer steals a fork, a knife, or a spoon, then eventually the company will either go broke, or have to raise the prices on its menu as it replaces all these items.

Perhaps, this is why now that I am in retirement and do a little business consulting, I always recommend that my restaurant clients buy cheap silverware. I tell them to buy Chinese made "cheap-ware" to combat this problem. Often, they laugh at me, but they usually agree. This is a really serious issue in our society, and a big one for small businesses. Please consider all this.